Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowElon Musk reached an agreement to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion on Monday, promising a more lenient touch to policing content on the social media platform where he—the world’s richest person—promotes his interests, attacks critics and opines on a wide range of issues to more than 83 million followers.
The outspoken Tesla CEO has said he wanted to own and privatize Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
Musk said in a joint statement with Twitter that he wants to make the service “better than ever” with new features while getting rid of automated “spam” accounts and making its algorithms open to the public to increase trust.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” the 50-year-old Musk said, adding hearts, stars and rocket emojis in a tweet that highlighted the statement.
The more hands-off approach to content moderation that Musk envisions has many users concerned that the platform will become more of a haven for disinformation, hate speech and bullying, something it has worked hard in recent years to mitigate. Wall Street analysts said if he goes too far, it could also alienate advertisers.
The deal was cemented roughly two weeks after the billionaire first revealed a 9% stake in the platform. Musk said last week that he had lined up $46.5 billion in financing to buy Twitter, putting pressure on the company’s board to negotiate a deal.
Twitter said the transaction was unanimously approved by its board of directors and is expected to close in 2022, pending regulatory sign-off and the approval of shareholders.
Shares of Twitter Inc. rose more than 5% Monday to $51.70 per share. On April 14, Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. While the stock is up sharply since Musk made his offer, it is well below the high of $77 per share it reached in February 2021.
Musk has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist” but is also known for blocking or disparaging other Twitter users who question or disagree with him.
In recent weeks, he has proposed relaxing Twitter content restrictions—such as the rules that suspended former President Donald Trump’s account—while ridding the platform of fake “spambot” accounts and shifting away advertising as its primary revenue model. Musk believes he can increase revenue through subscriptions that give paying customers a better experience—possibly even an ad-free version of Twitter.
Asked during a recent TED interview if there are any limits to his notion of “free speech,” Musk said Twitter would abide by national laws that restrict speech around the world. Beyond that, he said, he’d be “very reluctant” to delete posts or permanently banning users who violate the company’s rules.
It won’t be perfect, Musk added, “but I think we want it to really have the perception and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible.”
After the deal was announced, the NAACP released a statement urging Musk not to allow Trump, the 45th president, back onto the platform.
“Do not allow 45 to return to the platform,” the civil rights organization said in a statement. “Do not allow Twitter to become a petri dish for hate speech or falsehoods that subvert our democracy.”
As both candidate and president, Trump made Twitter a powerful megaphone for speaking directly to the public, often using incendiary and divisive language on hot-button issues. He was permanently banned from the service in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
Advertisers, currently Twitter’s main customers, have also pushed for the stronger content rules Musk has criticized. Keeping them happy requires moderation limiting hate speech so that brands aren’t trying to promote their products next to “calls for genocide,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia.
“If Musk either fires or drives away the team at Twitter that’s committed to keeping it clean and making it less hate-filled, he’ll see an immediate drop in user activity,” said Vaidhyanathan. “I think he’s going to find pretty fast that inviting the bigots back in is bad for business.”
Some users said Monday that they were planning to quit the platform if Musk took it over. To which he responded on Twitter: “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”
Musk has also run into trouble with federal officials as a result of his own tweets, some of which he’s used to taunt regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In one August 2018 tweet, for instance, Musk asserted that he had the funding to take Tesla private for $420 a share, although a court has ruled that it wasn’t true. That led to an SEC investigation that Musk is still fighting. More recently, Musk appeared to have violated SEC rules that required him to disclose that he’d acquired a 5% stake in Twitter; instead he waited until he had more than 9%. Experts say these issues aren’t likely to affect his Twitter acquisition.
While Twitter’s user base of more than 200 million remains much smaller than those of rivals such as Facebook and TikTok, the service is popular with celebrities, world leaders, journalists and intellectuals. Musk himself is a prolific tweeter with a following that rivals several pop stars in the ranks of the most popular accounts.
Last week, he said in SEC documents that the money would come from Morgan Stanley and other banks, some of it secured by his huge stake in Tesla, the electric-vehicle company he runs.
Musk has a fortune of nearly $268 billion, much of which is tied up in Tesla stock and SpaceX, his privately held space company. It’s unclear how much cash Musk holds.
Musk began making his fortune in 1999 when he sold Zip2, an online mapping and business directory, to Compaq for $307 million. He used his share to create what would become PayPal, an internet service that bypassed banks and allowed consumers to pay businesses directly. It was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
That same year, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, after finding that cost constraints were limiting NASA’s interplanetary travel. The company eventually developed cost-effective reusable rockets.
In 2004, Musk was courted to invest in Tesla, then a startup trying to build an electric car. Eventually he became CEO and led the company to astronomical success as the world’s most valuable automaker and largest seller of electric vehicles.
Musk’s pledge to make Twitter a haven for free speech could dim the appeal of Donald Trump’s troubled Truth Social app, which the former president has touted as a competitor to Twitter that would cater to conservatives. Truth Social is part of Trump’s new media company, which has agreed to be taken public by Digital World Acquisition Corp. Shares of DWAC dropped 16.2% Monday and are down 46% since Musk revealed his stake in Twitter.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Elon Musk…bringing back the 1st Amendment.
Yeah right…I for one am extremely skeptical that billionaires, especially those as self-centered and obnoxious as Elon Musk, care at all about protecting our rights. All he cares about is money.
Tell us you don’t understand the first amendment without telling us you don’t understand the first amendment.
Apologizes for the repeat but JCB is really on fire today with the bad takes.
“Musk has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist” but is also known for blocking or disparaging other Twitter users who question or disagree with him.”
Not a good sign. Bet it’s free speech for him but not for you or me.
Former Reddit CEO thinks he will be overwhelmed : https://mobile.twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
May we assume your feelings are the same for all billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg? Asking for a friend…
1) The 1st Amendment only applies to government infringing upon rights of speech, not corporations.
2) I have a bridge to sell you if you think that Elon Musk cares about anything other than his own ego and bank account.
So, JCB thinks that Elon Musk buying Twitter will stop the federal government from infringing on citizens rights to free speech?
How can you spend this much time on news sites and be so…. uneducated?
Social media has developed the most tyrannical agenda of censorship and programming as a function of career federal officials we “voted in”.
The documentary The Social Dilemma is a good intro to understand how if you manipulate what we think is a “free press” you can indirectly manipulate constituents.
The First Amendment has been under attack for decades.
So….. you wrote that long response and still do not understand what the first amendment is?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
JCB, the solution to your problem might be to vote in legislators who would restore the media consolidation rules that were in place for some time and maybe update them for the 21st century. But “Congress” isn’t a synonym for “social media”. If you don’t like social media, stay away from it.
James, why do you think so many people want an authoritarian government nowadays? Time was Republicans were free market and limited government. Boy are those days looooong gone.
They want the government to pick winners and losers in the free market and punish companies who dare possess opinions they don’t like.
Funny how the same people who fought for companies to be people in Citizens United … to give them unlimited political speech now want to punish companies because they aren’t saying what they want to hear. Can’t have it both ways.
All the right scum-of-the-earth are absolutely outraged about this.
I agree that Musk is largely self-serving and has a massive ego, making him no different than any of the other tech billionaires, or most politicians. Do we think AOC or Elizabeth Warren or Ted Cruz or Matt Gaetz aren’t also all completely stuck on themselves?
If he merely makes it less censorial than it was before, it will be an improvement over the current dumpster where emotionally stunted fat 35-year-old cat-people who dye their hair with Kool-aid come to smell one another’s…uh…musk.
Musk may not achieve this. And even if he does, it won’t get me to touch the vessel of reinforced narcissism that Twitter has engineered itself to be.
But at least the party who depends so heavily on censorship to maintain its hegemonic control will have less option to remove the party that refutes them. And we all know that, because they opt to censor rather than argue back, they cannot argue and their arguments don’t hold weight.
The shrieking of the usual suspects on this thread, who predictably all come out at once, shows their desperate attempt to downplay and cope.
Funniest thing of all: these navel-gazers think they have a much larger presence and influence than they do. So even if 100% leave, and even if the majority of the banned remain on marginal (but still very active) sites like Parler or Gab, it will still likely increase the reach and capitalization of the site…which is why shareholders who have a real stake (not the Twitter board, all of whom except Jack Dorsey own <.1% of the company) are rallying with this decision.
Agreed to both. I hope for free speech on the one hand while keeping my expectations low because he is a billionaire with an ego.
Yes, let’s all hope this a win for free speech and that Elon is good for his word.
While I don’t use twitter, I suspect when it is opened up to the wild west of first amendment free speech, the value of the platform will plummet as uses run away from the toxic environment and it will have the same success as Trump’s Truth Social.
That’s why he’s making it private. He doesn’t care if it makes him money or not. It will be his money-losing project akin to Jim Watkins’ 8chan. He *might* gain person value by owning the vehicle that he uses to manipulate the stock market.
If you want insight from the tech world, try this story:
https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-buys-twitter
The employees are soiling their diapers. They haven’t been this fearful since the unauthorized recording of that special meeting at Alphabet Inc (Google) after #45 won. They live in such a hermetically sealed reinforcement bubble that they can’t see the squalor that surrounds them. Mountain View is still pretty nice, I think–but Market Street San Francisco (home of Twitter) is an absolute cesspool.
Whistling past the graveyard, but too morally narcissistic to even begin to question their own political principles as its obvious failure encroaches and surrounds them.
Twitter was “Wild West” as recently at 2015 until the moral panic caused social contagion and mass formation about about 40% of the population. These are the same ones gunning for Weimar 2.0, which always was founded by such principles as extreme centralized government, deep collectivization, wealth redistribution, and the scapegoating of a group that lacked great institutional control…all things that are just TOTALLY right wing!
Quote from Dan M: “the value of the platform will plummet as users run away from the toxic environment”
You mean people who cannot defend their positions with fact or historical account and thus demand that opposing views be silenced, less their fragile misunderstanding of human nature be properly challenged, Dan?
Care to expand upon what you mean by “human nature”?
A stupendous take, indeed, Bob P. Hear, hear!
Unmoderated Internet forums never work.
If people wanted unmoderated forums, Parler and Gab would have left Twitter in the dust long ago.
+1
…to Bob P. that is…don’t get all amped Joe B now.
Yes, A.T.; happy to oblige. Human nature, for better or worse, is greedy, egotistical, and self-centered. History proves that every attempt at collectivism (the idealistic but unworkable -due to human nature- “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need” theory) has failed. Every. Time.
How many communes started by hippies who “dropped out” in the late 60s and early 70s are still up and running as envisioned? (I was in college at the time, so remember all the excitement about dropping out and learning everything one needs to know not from the Bible, but from The Mother Earth News.)
Have you visited New Harmony in southwest Indiana? It’s a pleasant place to visit and an interesting study as regards a local failure to prove this point.
Writer Ayn Rand wisely observed, “You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Methinks folks who are afraid of Twitter being opened up to points of view reflecting reality, rather than idealism, may be afraid of being exposed to periodic doses of reality….and/or the consequences of ignoring it. If history could prove the validity and “workability” of their idealistic thinking, it would prove their point. But history proves just the opposite…always due to human nature being a constant that does not change.
Talk about projecting, Bob. You have no interest in reality. You just want the ability to spread lies and to prevent people from challenging those lies.
How many times have you gone on and on and on about “targeted voter fraud” in large cities in the 2020 election. That’s a flat lie unsupported by any evidence. Yet to be any sort of Republican in good standing these days, you have to go along with the Big Lie. Ignore the 60 lost court cases. Ignore the multiple audits. Ignore reality. To not go along means you must be punished.
You want an alternate reality, your own idealism, and you want to make sure no one can challenge it. You don’t want to hear about how white Americas are becoming a minority, or how LBGTQ folks don’t have to hide in the closet, or how people don’t care about God any longer.
Time was I thought all those baby boomers, those hippies who grew up to be yuppies and who are now Trumpers, learned from their past mistakes. I think they’re just making the same ones over and over.
Well stated sir.
If Musk is successful at restoring Twitter roots and eliminating censorship and ideological policing, then maybe this is finally an example of ‘building back better’
My thoughts exactly Jeffery.
Exactly. The usual suspects can continue his copypasta from beloved sites like Media Matters, but the reality is that the numerous examples of 2020 Fraud, the Watergate-on-Steroids scandal of Hunter Biden’s promises to muckety mucks in China/Ukraine using “the Big Guy”, the ludicrousness of the Steele Dossier…all of this information failed to disseminate thanks to the censorial influence of Twitter and other Big Tech Giants working for the interest of one party–a party to whom it overwhelmingly made campaign contributions and who responded in kind with favors.
The copium from BlueAnoners is hilarious. The definition of cult is to inflict severe punishment–potentially death–to those who dare step out of line. This is the essence of canceling and is almost entirely the domain of the party to which IBJ’s BlueAnoners are in thrall.
“numerous examples of 2020 fraud”
Nothing says “I am not a serious individual, I am a cultist” than someone who still insists there was fraud in the 2020 election. Because, obviously, nefarious people would rig a presidential election but ensure a 50-50 split in the Senate and a loss of seats in the House that’s made it near impossible to move large chunks of the president’s platform.
What, you’re going to blame Twitter now instead of the legal system that has served this country for two centuries? Twitter made all those cases get thrown out? And, so much kvetching about Twitter but silence on Facebook. Funny, that.
Remember when Republicans were the party of personal responsibility? Now everything is someone else’s fault. Blame the media, blame Twitter, blame the minorities, it’s always someone else’s fault. Talk about a lot of people in need of a mirror or some self-awareness.
You’re projecting, Lauren. You want to cancel American Democracy. You want Putin’s Russia here in America, with Trump or DeSantis or some other “strong leader” to make up for something lacking in your life. They alone can fix what’s wrong, if we just banish all those who dare question Dear Leader. Use the power of the government to punish those who dare step out of line.
BlueAnon is cute, though. You’re really good at style, weak on the substance.
A triggered Joe B = manifest observable behavior of a previously well-functioning brain on CNN.
“If the mainstream media doesn’t cover it, it must misinformation or a conspiracy theory!” So hilarious.
CNN+ was like a “Heaven’s Gate” level failure. It employed 400 people yet got fewer than 10,000 viewers for the average program, while a socially awkward neckbeard who makes two videos a day from his basement pontificating on current events can easily get 200,000 views on YouTube. What a testament to the credibility of The Cathedral’s Narrative at this point. Yet you still pray five times a day when the call comes from the minarets. Mixed metaphor, I know.
We’re not even a democracy Joe. And the modern left is precisely why the Founding Fathers made us a constitutional republic. They’re gnashing their teeth for mob rule, which is why they always say “democracy” and not “republic”. We all saw how they were during the Chauvin and Rittenhouse verdicts. They’d like formation that repeated nationwide. No different than when the Klan were surrounding southern courthouses to pressure juries to make decisions against civil rights leaders. Gosh, I wonder which party that was?
The modern neo-libs: shriek when corporations are stripped of their special privileges to act as pseudo-cities, banging the drum for ever more war, claiming Nazis are everywhere as they seek to create ghettos for people who don’t trust Pfizer as much as they do, smashing the windows of small businesses owned by Russian Americans, and using trust funders with Ivy lLeague degrees and cushy positions in corporate media to ridicule working-class and small business owners while deploying their dox mobs to stand outside Joe Six Pack’s 3BR ranch home. So much “the party for the working man”–I’m sorry, “mxn”.
Funny times!
You don’t get this right or humble wasting time with consuming any TV, much less TV news, Lauren. But go on with more projecting.
I’ll just be here wondering why it’s the Republicans who always seem to stick up for the Russians. Why exactly do they want to turn America into a banana republic? Why do they hate America so much?
Maybe you ought to listen to the audio recordings of what they really think about Trump, what they said after that little coup attempt. Maybe those didn’t get through your bubble. I could see how that might trigger you. Me, I’m most worried that what when they had to choose between loyalty to a person or a country, they chose the person. Won’t end well for any of us.
It’s nice to see that Joe and Lauren are getting really close to finding common ground on everything.
I’m not ready for anymore mean tweets though!!!
Lauren B. has taken the lead with style.
Ryan H. and I will just be here with popcorn… 🍿
That she has, JCB. Right on.
Keep telling yourself more of those lies. As the exceedingly mediocre movie once said, Reality Bites.